As the value and use of information continues to increase, individuals and businesses seek additional ways to process and store information. One option available to users is information handling systems. An information handling system generally processes, compiles, stores, and/or communicates information or data for business, personal, or other purposes thereby allowing users to take advantage of the value of the information. Because technology and information handling needs and requirements vary between different users or applications, information handling systems may also vary regarding what information is handled, how the information is handled, how much information is processed, stored, or communicated, and how quickly and efficiently the information may be processed, stored, or communicated. The variations in information handling systems allow for information handling systems to be general or configured for a specific user or specific use such as financial transaction processing, airline reservations, enterprise data storage, or global communications. In addition, information handling systems may include a variety of hardware and software components that may be configured to process, store, and communicate information and may include one or more computer systems, data storage systems, and networking systems.
As is known in the art, information handling systems typically have operating systems installed thereon. Generally speaking, an operating system may be any program of executable instructions, or aggregation of programs of executable instructions, configured to manage and/or control the allocation and usage of hardware resources and provide an interface between such hardware resources and application programs hosted by the operating system. Often, it is desirable to customize various configuration parameters of an operating system, depending on the hardware resources of the information handling system, user credentials for the information handling system, and/or user preferences.
In situations in which a user or administrator manages a large number of information handling systems, it may be desirable to employ automation to deploy customized operating systems to such a large number of information handling systems, as manual deployment may be time consuming and costly. However, many operating systems use stateless technologies as their boot processes and are unable to, with traditional approaches, use automation to apply customization during the installation process.